I lose time on a regular basis when I am writing.''īorn in Brisbane of European and Murri Aboriginal descent, she worked as a barmaid, delivery driver and karate instructor before graduating from Griffith University with an honours degree in public policy in 1990. This was my consolation, to go back and live there for several hours a day while I wrote.
I lost my horses, I lost my beautiful house.
''I was forced out of the Northern Rivers. The longing with which she writes, the hymn to a beloved country, comes from the five years of writing she spent in the near exile of suburban Brisbane after a divorce. Lucashenko spent most of the decade from 2000 raising children and horses on the coast and deep in the hinterland. The displaced homesickness for tribal land is not just a generational malaise. Part of life's long journey into adulthood and eventually elderhood for Aboriginal people is to be mindful and to be observant of both people and of all sentient beings.'' ''And a group of boys actually walked back from about Rockhampton or even further north, hiding all the way to get back to their home country.''īut the acute observation of the natural world is not only a writer taking notes calculatedly for literary purposes. ''There were people from far northern NSW and the Gold Coast kidnapped into the native police and transferred up into Queensland,'' she says. Lucashenko's great-grandmother Christina was taken from the Tweed at the age of eight to be a ''servant-slave'' in Queensland. The morning felt miraculous … It seemed to her as if the day - this morning, this sun upon these hills - called for a kind of reverence that she could barely express.'' White wisps lingered among the dark knotty pines beside it. Lucashenko writes: ''The bottom dam was hazy with mist. ''For people who practise Aboriginal lore, there is very little distinction between the land and self.''
It is a ''blueprint'' embedded in the psyche, written on the body. Someone knows she is there and someone is welcoming her, but not everything is understood and not everything is to be understood.'' This is about the mystery at the heart of things. ''It is hard not to take these things as signs sometimes. ''I have been that close to a wedge-tail, they are a spectacular bird,'' Lucashenko says.
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